Calculator
Interview transcription cost calculator
Enter the interviews you have and how long they run. Get the audio hours, the days typing them yourself would take, and what each route charges, including the plans your study will not fit.
Free, and nothing is sent anywhere. The figures are computed in your browser.
Minutes per recording
Total audio
12 hours
Typing it yourself
48 hours
At four hours of work per hour of audio, the commonly published figure for someone who does not transcribe for a living.
Paid by the hour
Rev, human transcription
$1.99 an audio minute, $2.69 with three or more speakers
$1,433
NVivo Transcription credits
€34.77 an hour, bought on top of an NVivo licence
€417
Sonix, pay as you go
$10 an audio hour, no subscription
$120
Paid by the month
Monthly allowances cap how much of a study clears in one cycle, so the total below is the subscription multiplied by the months the volume needs.
Phonotheca Solo
20 audio hours a month, archive and search included
$12
Phonotheca Pro
50 audio hours a month
$29
Otter Basic
Free, 300 minutes a month, 3 imports for the life of the account
Does not fit
Each recording is capped at 30 minutes, so a 60-minute interview is cut short.
Only 3 file imports are allowed for the life of the account, against 12 interviews.
Otter Pro
1,200 minutes and 10 imports a month, 90 minutes per recording
$33.98
2 months at $16.99
The allowance covers the hours, but 10 uploads a month spreads 12 interviews over 2 months.
Otter Business
Uncapped minutes and imports, 4 hours per recording
$30
Happy Scribe Pro
600 minutes a month, overage at €0.20 a minute
€58
2 months at €29
Sonix Advanced
20 hours a month
$50
Vendor prices as published in August 2026, each shown in the currency its vendor lists, with no conversion applied. Otter, Sonix, and Phonotheca prices are in USD, NVivo and Happy Scribe in EUR. Tax is excluded throughout.
What moves the number
Audio hours drive almost everything. A study is the number of interviews multiplied by their average length, and every vendor that meters honestly meters that. Where quotes diverge wildly for the same study, the difference is usually a human typing against a model transcribing.
File counts are the second variable, and the one that surprises people. Several tools price a monthly allowance in minutes and then cap the number of files you may upload against it, so a round of short interviews exhausts the upload counter long before the minutes. Recording length caps work the same way. Where a plan stops at 30 or 90 minutes per file, a long life history is transcribed up to the cap.
Voices matter for human services, which charge more for three or more speakers, and for automated ones they change what you get rather than what you pay. Two-person interviews separate cleanly. Focus groups with overlap are where every automated tool struggles, which is why agencies still send facility recordings to human transcription.
The cost that does not appear in any quote is what happens after the transcript arrives. A study is re-read, re-searched, and quoted from for months, and a transcript sitting in a downloads folder gets searched by opening files one at a time.
See how a whole study is handledCommon questions about cost
- How much does it cost to transcribe one hour of audio?
- Human transcription is the top of the range at roughly $120 an audio hour, from Rev's published $1.99 a minute, rising to $2.69 a minute where three or more people speak. Automated services run from about $10 an audio hour paid as you go down to $0.58 on a subscription that meters hours. NVivo sells credits at €34.77 an hour on top of its licence.
- How long does it take to transcribe one hour of audio yourself?
- About four hours for someone who does not transcribe for a living, and two to three for a professional. Difficult audio, several voices, or an unfamiliar accent push it higher. The calculator uses the four-hour figure.
- Why does the same study cost more on some subscriptions?
- Monthly plans cap how much clears in one cycle, so a study larger than one month's allowance is billed for however many months it takes. Some plans also cap uploads by file count, which can stretch a study across more months than its hours alone would need.
- Does a longer interview cost more than two short ones?
- On anything metered by audio hour, no. One 90-minute interview and three 30-minute interviews cost the same. On plans that count files, the three short ones cost three times as much of the allowance, and on plans that cap recording length the 90-minute one comes back truncated.
- Is free local transcription a serious option?
- Yes, for a single study. noScribe is free and MacWhisper is €65 once, both running Whisper on your own machine, and nothing leaves it. Budget roughly three hours of processing per hour of audio on an ordinary laptop, and expect to fix speaker labels by hand. What they do not do is keep a corpus searchable across rounds or share it with anyone.
- What does Phonotheca charge?
- Solo is $12 a month for 20 audio hours and Pro is $29 for 50, which works out at $0.60 and $0.58 an audio hour. Three hours are free once, and the archive, search, tagging, and export keep working whether or not you pay again.
Keep reading
Start with the interviews you already have
Three audio hours are free, at any recording length, with no file counter.